At least this is what one American father found while paging through his child's science book. SmT was astonished to find seventh graders being taught about chemtrails. And geoengineeering their home planet.

Anyone with question about the "spray programs" he now says, "should perhaps just ask their kids."

The chemtrails section is found in the Centre Point Learning Science I Essential Interactions science book. Under "Solutions for Global Warming", section 5.19 features a photo of a big multi-engine jet sporting a familiar orange/red paint scheme.

The caption reads: "Figure 1- Jet engines running on richer fuel would add particles to the atmosphere to create a sunscreen".

The logo on the plane says: "Particle Air".

"I kid you not," SmT insists. "Why did I spend all of that time doing research when I could have just asked my kids?"

Helping habituate children to a life under lethal sunshine and "protective" spray planes, this trippy textbook urges young readers to "Use Sun Block". But its authors are referring to a sunscreen spread across the sky.

"Could we deliberately add particles to the atmosphere?" asks the text, before helpfully suggesting that "Burning coal adds soot to the air."

You might be old enough to recoil at such a notion. But in a country where down is up and wrong is right, your kids could be learning that what used to be bad and a bummer is a now good thing!

RUNNING ON EMPTY
"Be real interesting to see the politics of the folks putting this out." SmT suggests.

In the current White House, those politics are as "crude" as invading oil-rich Iraq over a bogus nuclear threat - while permitting Pakistan to export atom bomb materials to terrorist organizations in return for the chance at an election-boosting capture of Osama bin Laden by US forces in the Hindu Kush later this month. [New Yorker Mar1/04]

Why shouldn't the same petrol politics produce textbooks for children inheriting a nightmare? Led by a piggish petroleum president, with most major nations cutting back, US oil consumption is rising as steeply as supplies of cheap crude are collapsing.

The coal connection is this: In order to briefly "stretch the glide" of the fast-looming end of cheap oil that will utterly transform life as we know it, America's unelected oil president recently revoked pollution regulations on more than 2,000 of the nation's biggest polluting coal-fired power plants.

Ironically, this move - like so many others made by an oil-addled White House - will only hasten an Earthwreck as shattering to all onboard as a lurching square-rigger striking a rocky reef. Except our spaceship is surrounded by the cold, irradiated vacuum of deep space.

It turns out that a single 150-megawatt coal-burning power plant produces more emissions than 300,000 cars. Termed an "Extreme Human health Hazard" by the EPA, microscopic coal particles also rot lungs, stop hearts, kill lakes, choke cities - and stunt the lives of school kids with deadly sulphuric acid rain. [AP Aug27/03; LA Times Aug28/03]

World scientists looking at deliberately putting megatons more sulphur into a closed, recirculating atmosphere already smoggy enough to depresses orbiting astronauts, decided that a sulphur sunscreen is not a swift idea.

But not this Jr. High science text. "Creating either kind of sunscreen would be cheap," it tells young readers. As if "cheap" is the only consideration.

Even this claim is bogus. SmT says he looked, but the section on the downstream costs associated with the health and environmental effects of massive coal pollution - or the 10 million tons of a chemical sunscreen suggested by the late Edward Teller - "seemed to have been left out."

Ditto "the cost to the solar industry". Or cumulative impacts on kids, critters and plants on which our future depends.

DIMMING PROSPECTS
Sunlight is already on the way out. Repeatedly expressing shock at how quickly our space colony's life-support systems are failing, scientists are finding levels of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface decreasing by almost 3% a decade.

"Global Dimming" is too small to detect with the eye. "But it has implications for everything from climate change to solar power and even the future sustainability of plant photosynthesis," reports the Guardian.

All those jet-propelled vacations and car trips to the corner store add up. Since 1960, 10% less sunlight has reached Earth's inhabitants. Levels of solar radiation reaching parts of the former coal-belching Soviet Union are down almost 20%.

In any greenhouse, the rule of a green thumb is that every 1% decrease in solar radiation results in a 1% drop in plant productivity.

"It's actually quite a big deal,” says Graham Farquhar, a climate scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra. But get this: Farquhar doesn't think that identified pollutants, "by themselves would be able to produce this amount of global dimming." [Guardian Dec18/03]

The baffled Aussie should check out the role of contrails in turning off sunlight. Since the Jet Age took off in the 1960s, normal condensation trails from five million jet flights every year have been found to block 10% of sunlight across Europe and the USA. Over heavily trafficked Atlantic and American air-routes, artificial cloud cover caused by jet engine pollutants has increased 20%. [Chemtrails Confirmed '04]

Chemtrails are another major sunblock. Measurements taken with a calibrated photometer by Clifford Carnicom in Santa Fe show a rapid reduction in sunlight - from a value of 97% on a “clear day” to around 80% during the early stages of heavy chemtrailing. Using a simple UV radiation meter, this reporter has confirmed similar drops in sunlight beneath artificial "chemcasts" on Canada's west coast.

WHAT JANE AND DICK DIDN'T LEARN IN SCHOOL TODAY
In a country whose self-appointed regime routinely censors scientific studies, at least some 7th grade science are more focused on indoctrinating kids with risky techno "quick-fixes" than conscious conservation and common sense.

Forget science. SmT gazed in disbelief at another schoolbook picture showing a helicopter seeding the ocean with iron particles. These desperate "IronX" experiments did indeed trigger plankton "blooms" that, in turn, transferred tons of atmospheric C02 underwater as those carbon-inhaling critters eventually died and sank to the seafloor.

But – oops! – his kid's science book fails to mention that the resulting ocean blooms also sucked all available oxygen from the seawater, suffocating all marine life in massive, spreading "dead zones". [Chemtrails Confirmed '04]

Where are the picture, SmT wonders, "of people planting trees, or turning down thermostats, or bicycling, or any of the other ways not to add to the problem?"

Though his family gave up the idea of home schooling, he says, "it's perhaps time to reconsider."

Perhaps it's also time to reconsider state-sponsored brainwashing. And other escalating consequences of our carbon addiction, as well.